After Alice (35 page)

At the dinner table, Sidonie reverses her earlier thought. Mr. Defoe, she sees now, is not the ball, but another player, taking on both her father and Alice (and now her mother as well) all at once. He does not drop the ball, she sees, though he's often cut off in midsentence. He doesn't say anything that Father would see as arrogant or boastful, or that Mother would say was coarse, or that Alice would complain was uneducated.
He acquits himself well
, a voice inside her head says, as if reading from a book, and she smiles, privately. So she is caught off guard when he addresses her directly in the lull brought on by the chewing of pork chops.

“And where do you go to school, Sidonie?”

She swallows too hastily through a perhaps constricted throat, chokes, knocks over her water glass, and bumps the table leg hard with her knee. Alice's eyes narrow: she will make Sidonie pay, after.
Spazz
, she will say, meaning spastic.

Sidonie says, not looking up, that she goes to school in town.

“And will you go to the new high school when it opens?”

Yes, she says. But she cannot drag her eyes to Mr. Defoe's face, as she knows is polite. She glances wildly at Alice, but Alice's face is set, remote. Will Mother rescue her? But Mother is busy with the gravy boat.

Father says, “We shall all be glad to have the high school here in Marshall's Landing. Too long have our youth been drawn out of the community.”

Now Sidonie feels irritated instead of awkward. Does Father always have to sound like he's intoning Goethe? Mr. Defoe must think they're comical. She must do something to mend the net, or Alice's minnow will escape and it will be her fault.

She raises her eyes to their visitor's face, as nearly as she can. A million sparks of conversation flicker and die on her tongue. When she speaks, her voice sounds tremulous to her own ears.

“What do you like to do for fun, Mr. Defoe?”

Is that what she had said? Something like that. Whatever it had been, it hadn't been the right thing, though nobody had apparently noticed the long calculating look Mr. Defoe had given her before turning back to his plate.

Father's cherries, which are a different strain, ripen later than the Inglises', so there is no shortage of pickers. School is out, and Sidonie and Walt and Masao, and Alice on her days off, all pick for Mr. Inglis, or rather, Mr. Defoe, and then for Nakamuras, and then in their own orchards.

“Pick clean!” Mr. Defoe says, as if they haven't been picking cherries all their lives. He treats them no differently than the other pickers, though he has been to their house, and comes by every few days to pick Alice up. (“Where do you go?” Sidonie asks, and Alice says, “None of your beeswax.”) But once, when he shouts at Alice to clean more of the stones and leaves out of her bag before she dumps it, Alice mutters, just loudly enough for Sidonie to hear: “Oh, go hump yourself.”

It is better when they are picking their own cherries. Then Sidonie can eat as many as she wants — her mouth and fingers and the soles of her feet are stained purple for that whole week.

In their own orchard, too, they have Masao to goof around with. Mr. Defoe had put the men from the camp down in the Hare Road orchard, so they never saw him. Masao is here with his hijinks, his jet-eyed grin. He carries Alice's bag sometimes, and arranges to work in the tree next to hers. He helps Sidonie, and jokes with her, too. But it is Alice who is Masao's friend.

In August there is time between picking cherries and picking apricots and peaches to spend the whole day at the lake, and the younger set converge there by late morning, parents driving down the hill in the late afternoon, bringing picnics and folding chairs. Mother packs egg salad sandwiches or potato salad (the hens laying superbly now) or sometimes an entire cold fried chicken (the expendable roosters), crisp and paprika-scented, the way Father likes it. (Paprika, Sidonie thinks, is made of ground red earth from some exotic, tropical country; it imparts to food the tang of palms and dust and sun and wild music played on long-stemmed string instruments, and the taste of some fruit that she will only many years later identify as mangoes.) Also there are rolls and butter and cake and fruit — apricots or raspberries. Mr. Tanaka and Masao and some of their friends come along as well. Mother and Father and Mr. Tanaka will plant their unfolded chairs on the shallow beach, and ceremoniously, ritualistically, disrobe.

Sidonie used to find this process terrifying, but now it's only embarrassing to see the adults in their bathing suits. Mr. Tanaka with his thin, ribby chest, his little pot, his smooth, hairless body like Masao's, only slacker, stretched out like an old sweater; Father with the blond pelt on his chest, as if the hair from his head has migrated to his torso, his white legs and upper arms contrasting startlingly with his sunburned neck and forearms; Mother, with her skirted bathing dress (Out of the twenties! Alice protests) and the blue spider veins like cryptic messages on her legs.

They swim in the little bay, next to the pier and pilings and great red hulk of the packing house. The camp road, if you follow it to the hill's crest, past the reservoir and down again, zig-zags in hairpin turns down the steep slope to the lake. At the end, the road plunges straight down like a boy running across a field on the last day of school. The hillside between the orchards is dotted with ponderosa pine and balsam-root and saskatoon bushes, but along the narrow shoreline, cottonwoods grow, providing shade and shielding the beach from the view of the road and hills, so it seems a separate, discrete world.

Alice spreads her mat and arranges her things, slowly taking off her shorts and shirt. This year Alice's bathing suit is a two-piece: red bottoms, a red and white halter top. She looks, Sidonie thinks, like a candy cane. All the boys and men look at her; they don't try to disguise that. How can Alice bear it? She, Sidonie, would hate it. But Alice seems oblivious, unconcerned.

Sidonie wears one of Alice's old suits. It's navy, and has faded to an uneven purplish shade, and the white piping has turned grey. Sidonie has worn it for two summers already. She likes it, despite its ugliness: it feels comfortable, familiar. Mother tried to throw it out this year, but Sidonie is glad she has kept it. It fits her better than it did before, sitting becomingly on her chest and hips now, instead of hanging in folds. She feels vindicated in saving it: it has become a second skin.

The small flat stones that line the beach change colour at the water's edge: the dry ones are dull: grey, fawn, with little contrast, while under the water, they gleam like semi-precious gems: jade, tiger-eye, jet, quartz. Sometimes she finds translucent agates: at home she has a small bag of these that she has been collecting for years.

Overhead, the sky is cloudless, a deep, even saturated blue. The lake is a darker blue, and the hills on the far side a different shade yet, though of course they're not really blue, but dark green from the pines and firs, and gold from the sunburned grass. And the lake is not really blue: only in the distance, where it reflects sky. At the shore, it is clear, like glass, and a little deeper, a light, shimmery green: beyond that, deeper green, though still translucent.

She wades in to her knees, her thighs, then stands transfixed, watching the play of light and colour in the water, which has become a layered, moving thing. Minnows materialize, nibble at her shins.

Alice says from the beach, from under the brim of her hat: “Sidonie, don't flap.”

Has she been flapping? Yes, and humming, too. She holds her arms down by her sides, wades further in, drawing the minnows after her. Now her feet find the cold layer, and the surface, rising up her thighs, is also cold, but not as cold. The differences in temperature and the tickling of the minnows make her aware of her feet and legs as different regions: she is segmented. She pauses a moment, then lets herself fall into the lake sideways, lightly, so that there is no splash or sound.

Submerged, swimming with her eyes open, she sees the water is clear — not like glass, but like something else she has never seen, but can imagine — something viscous, but so bright that light is refracted stronger, intensified by it. For as long as she can hold her breath, she is free in this medium — free of gravity, of the gaze of others. She arches her back and swims, seahorse-like, along the smooth bottom stones. They are black, white, ochre, rose, green-grey. They form a mosaic of a kind: random, abstract, but with a sense of pattern, a pattern she could discern, if only she could stay under long enough.

She launches herself upward for a few lungfuls of air, and is under again. Now she noses along the bottom, waving her legs from side to side for thrust, fluttering her fingers for equilibrium. The small ripples she leaves on the surface are reflected on the lake bottom, a net of light. She swims in the net, banking and rolling to catch her own shadow, which, infant-sized, darts along with her.

She surfaces again, gulps in more air (oh, how delicious, how taken for granted!) and plunges in again. This time she follows the splintery stump of a piling to its root, pulling herself down hand over hand, climbing in reverse. At the base of the post she finds a strip of algae, lank, like a hank of hair. All at once she is afraid: it will wrap around her ankle, drown her.

Towards shore is brighter. She swims hard, under the water, using her strong long legs and arms, froglike. When she is in the shallows, she sees that Masao has come into shore as well, and is flicking water at Alice and laughing, and that Alice launches herself into the water, grabs his ankles.

But Masao turns, lithe as a water snake, and seizes Alice's wrists. Now he's pulling her into deeper water. He locks fingers with her, pushes her under, but Alice wraps her legs around his waist and drags him down with her. They grin at each other, face to face in the churned water. Masao's hair floats upward: he's an attenuated troll. Streams of silver bubbles float from his nose, his ears, his hair and shoulders. He twists to free himself, but Alice clings, locking her ankles.

Then all at once Masao scissors his legs together, shooting them both upward. Alice's legs unlock, she gasps air. Masao is gasping too, and laughing. He shakes out his hair, so that brilliant gleaming drops fly around them.

Masao unlocks his fingers from her wrist, arches his back. Alice lets herself float away, starfish like, on the lake's silky surface. Only her face, her toes, and her breasts in their red and white nylon shell emerge above the surface.

On the beach, Masao prostrates himself next to Alice. He doesn't have a towel; he lies on the bare hot rocks. Sidonie sits on the edge of the water so that her legs are in the water, leans back into her arms, lets the sun fall on her face and throat. It's like a shower of warm honey, only not sticky. Walt digs a pool in the gravel with some younger children. The water is cloudy where they dig, full of the silt and yellow pollen that lie buried under the clean, smooth river gravel, and they laboriously bail it clear, fill it with clean.

Then Walt and the McCartney twins, hatted and shirted for protection of their almost translucent skins, stand in the shallows, waiting to scoop up somnolent minnows. Sidonie remembers this activity: how building a pool and system of canals could fill a whole day. How the pleasure of it would draw you inexorably in. How Mother would say, you'd
never
stick to shelling peas or picking raspberries that long.

How you could lose yourself an hour at a time collecting white stones or the conical, screw-shaped snails that lived on the larger, algae-covered rocks at the far end of the bay.

While her feet cool in the water, her head and shoulders heat; she feels the metals in her tissue become charged, liquid with heat. She is two beings: the molten Sidonie absorbing the sun; the cool fish Sidonie waiting, chill, unawakened, under the lake water.

Walt calls to her from the pier, and executes a perfect back flip. Near perfect. Sidonie can do better. She stands and plunges into the water, suddenly, noisily, arousing murmurs of protest from Alice and Masao, is momentarily alive to the sudden swirling of cool water around her heated head, and strokes quickly out to join Walt.

She pulls herself up to the ladder slats, walks wet-footed across the silvery, slivery wood planks to the edge. Toes pointed to the open lake, heels on the wooden edge, she finds the position that will catapult her perfectly in an arc extending from the earth's centre, then springs. The forces of gravity, of momentum, of centrifuge; the pull of stars, the leap of molecules all gather in her legs, her arched spine. The crown of her head lifts her up, up, over; she feels her spine and legs now follow, a lariat, a flung chain. Her fingertips part the surface of the water; then her head and torso and toes. She feels each cell of her skin join with the water. It takes no time at all.

Then she arcs up through the water, her limbs smoothly building on the propulsion of the dive. The lake parts for her, supports her, lifts her. (How is it, Alice always says, that Sidonie can swim like a fish, but can't walk across a room without tripping over her own feet?) But she is a fish, a fish girl, all sinuous eely tail and trunk, strong supple arms. She is fish girl, cool, mailed in chitin, slippery, gilled. She is sleek, she hides in shadows, she watches from her cool refracting element, she moves without hindrance or hesitation.

She pulls herself through the water, waving her tail-legs behind her.

On some evenings
and on Sundays, the Inglises also arrive at the beach, which is an occasion, a procession. First Mrs. Inglis, swathed in a flowery dress — a robe, really — and large white-rimmed sunglasses, an enormous straw hat, and carrying a straw bag; then Mr. Inglis with at least two hampers, one of which clinks, and finally Graham and Hugh, laden with chairs and umbrellas and floating mattresses. They always set up in the same place, where the beach is widest, the cottonwood shade deepest. If anyone is there already, they always move, give up their place to the Inglises. Then Mr. Inglis takes the umbrella and plants it in the river gravel like a flag. Once, Alice asked why the Inglises always had the best spot on the beach, and Mother said it was because Mr. Inglis had paid to have several barge loads of fine river stone brought in and poured on the shore; that the beach was pebbled and gradual, rather than steep and muddy, was due to his beneficence.